APRIL’s Tissue Culture Lab Drives Productivity and Sustainability
Marking a scientific milestone after two decades of research and development work, APRIL’s establishment of the world’s first clonal plantation of Acacia crassicarpa trees in commercial forestry has boosted APRIL’s capability to increase plantation productivity and ensure genetic consistency. APRIL’s Tissue Culture Lab is a key driver of this achievement.
The 3200m2 facility, at APRIL’s main industrial complex in Pangkalan Kerinci in Riau Province, Sumatra is essentially a state-of-the-art facility for producing baby plants.
Fachrie Irawan, Tissue Culture Manager, who is in charge of the facility calls them “forests in a bottle.” He said his team can guarantee the quality and health of the plants because the “indoor farming conditions” in the lab can be precisely monitored. “We can control humidity, temperature, lighting — everything. So we can stabilise production,” he said.
The TCL is one of only two such facilities in Indonesia and acts as a repository for a vast array of genetic diversity in the two tree species that the company grows in its plantations: Eucalyptus and Acacia crassicarpa.
Maintaining that diversity is crucial to APRIL’s future success because it is the source of future varieties that may hold the genetic key to resilience to as-yet-unknown pests or environmental challenges.
Scaling Up
But equally important is the capability the lab provides to scale up production of plants with a specific, identical genetic makeup (or clones). Each of the 220 workers at the site operating in two shifts can produce around 1,000 plantlets per day. That amounts to an output of around 50 million per year — a significant chunk of the more than 200 million seedlings required by the plantations annually.
The traditional method for producing these plants, which the company still uses, is to propagate them as cuttings in the nursery from so-called mother plants. That still works well but tissue culture has several advantages. For one, the seedlings that come from the lab have better performance and recovery in nursery. The team can also counter the effects of cell aging. The success of Acacia crassicarpa cuttings drops off when mother plants reach around 18 months old.
APRIL first began to experiment with tissue culture for Eucalyptus back in 2003, but production only hit industrial scale with the establishment of the TCL in 2019. Productivity has continued to improve with throughput increasing from an initial 35 million to 50 million now.
